Yes, it did. But that’s not the important question. The question we must be ask is “What authority does the Supreme Court have to force the states to allow mass murder?” The answer is “none.” The Constitution mandates equal protection of the law for all. Neither the Supreme Court nor Congress nor any other political entity is Constitutionally authorized to legalize the murder of a certain class of human beings. Any statute, court opinion, or regulation that allows for unequal protection of the law is null and void by nature.
Further, any such statute, court opinion, or regulation must be ignored on moral grounds. Even if Roe did have a basis in the Constitution, state governments would be obligated to ignore it. Above any man-made statute is the law of God, written on every man’s heart, which outlaws murder. “I’m just following orders” is what Nazis on trial in Nuremberg said and they were rightfully executed. That’s no excuse for allowing mass murder. State governments following the Supreme Court’s order to allow mass murder are no different. When a superior orders you to allow mass murder, the only appropriate response is defiance and resistance.
So yes, the Supreme Court has opined that every state in the union must allow abortion. Will we abide by the Supreme Court’s opinion that mass murder should be legal, and thereby ignore the US Constitution and God’s word? Or will we abide by God’s word and the US Constitution and nullify Roe?
By only criminalizing abortionists and giving the mother automatic immunity in all cases, pro-life laws legalize self-induced abortions. With the abortion industry moving toward more chemical and self-induced abortions anyway, all pro-life laws do is expedite the evolution of the abortion industry. The only way to stop that is to criminalize the act of abortion itself, not simply write a law prohibiting certain people from performing it.
Out of a desire to appease the culture and prove that they’re the true feminists and that they’re compassionate toward the people paying to have their children murdered, pro-life lobbyists and political leaders have always given immunity to the parents who have their children killed. This is not compassionate. As abolitionist Jason Storms explained at the hearing for the Abolition of Abortion in Texas Act in 2019, he would never have had his child murdered if he knew he would’ve had to face the consequences.
“I was guilty as an accomplice in the murder of my own child, and I should have been prosecuted accordingly… Mothers and fathers – parents – right now in Texas can be charged with parental neglect, parental abuse, and even parental homicide when we see the tragedy of parents taking the lives of their own children. It’s because mothers and fathers have a duty to love and protect their children. That responsibility doesn’t start when they’re born, but it starts when they’re conceived.
“Here’s a fact: my girlfriend and I, if we knew we would’ve been facing homicide charges, would never have aborted that child. That child would be alive today. I’d have a 22-year-old little child that I could celebrate life with right now that’s not here. The law is a deterrent to crime. We shouldn’t think of this only as a matter of putting a woman on the stand. We should think of this as a great deterrent. Men and women would not think of doing this if we stood firm on the law and provided equal protection for these children.”
There’s nothing loving about laws that allow people to murder their own children without consequences. It’s a moral atrocity that actually brings harm to abortion-minded parents.
Further, inconsistencies like giving out automatic immunity played a major role in the Roe decision. Roe author Harry Blackmun wrote in footnote 54 of the Roe decision that by giving automatic immunity to the primary perpetrators of the crime, the state of Texas was betraying the fact that they didn’t actually think preborn humans were fully human and deserving of protection. If Christians and pro-lifers aren’t consistently treating abortion like murder, why would the culture or the courts believe us when we call it murder?
To read more about why giving automatic immunity to the parents unravels the case against abortion, see our “Criminalization” page.
While defending his decision to kill the Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act, OK Senate President Greg Treat said “[nullification] is not the heroes of the stories, it’s the villains of the stories. . . To wrap yourself in a nullification banner is to be on the wrong side of history.” This is nonsense, but it’s widely accepted nonsense.
In 1854, federal marshals approached the cabin of escaped slave Joshua Glover to kidnap him and return him to his “owner” as mandated in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The local sheriff arrested the federal marshals. The people of Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin broke into jailhouse and freed Glover. Sherman Boothe, who rallied the people to break Glover out was charged for violating the Fugitive Slave Act, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court ignored the Act and acquitted Glover. At every level, the people and magistrates of Wisconsin had nullified the wicked federal law. Nullification was the tool employed by the abolitionists, not the Confederates.
Under similar conditions, William “Jerry” Henry was broken out of custody in Syracuse by about 2,500 abolitionists in 1851. 26 were tried for helping Jerry escape, and only one convicted. The other 25 were acquitted due to jury nullification being employed against federal law.
In 1850, Vermont passed the Habeas Corpus Act which required the state to “use all lawful means to protect, defend, and procure to be discharged” anyone who’d been “arrested or claimed as a fugitive slave in Vermont.” This explicitly nullified the Fugitive Slave Act which mandated escapees be brought back to their “owners” without trial. While being less confrontational than their compatriots in Milwaukee and Syracuse, Vermont abolitionists knew that local and state judges and juries would employ jury nullification against the Fugitive Slave Act freeing the captured slaves in the vast majority of cases. A few years later, Michigan passed the Personal Freedom Act, a nearly identical law.
Massachusetts’ Personal Liberty Act of 1855 made enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act a crime punishable by a sentence of up to five years. Further, it mandated impeachment for any state official who aided slave-catchers and disbarred all attorneys assisting in the return of slaves to their “owners.”
Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was among the statesmen of the pro-nullification movement. “Since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress, I find myself in a position with respect to it, which I fear my fellow citizens generally are not prepared to justify,” Whittier wrote. “So far as that law is concerned, I am a nullifier.” Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison concurred in an article for The Liberator: “The nullification advocated by Mr Whittier…is loyalty to goodness.”
Slave owners and supporters, on the other hand, despised nullification. The New Orleans Bee, for instance, published a preemptive attack on Vermont’s rejection of federal law: “Fortunately, too, her position is such that she will probably never have occasion to attempt to put into practice her vile theories of nullification. If she ever should, we rely on the President, and on the people of Vermont themselves to bring the State back to reason, and to prove that ‘nullification’ north or south of the Potomac will be put down at all hazards.”
South Carolina Senator and later Confederate President Jefferson Davis made clear his disdain for nullification on numerous occasions. During his US Senate farewell address, Davis explained that the severity of his hatred for nullification precluded him from coexisting in a union with states which practiced it.
“Nullification and secession, so often confounded, are indeed, antagonistic principles. Nullification is a remedy which it is sought to apply within the Union, and against the agent of the States. It is only to be justified then the agent has violated his constitutional obligations…but, when the States themselves and when the people of the States have so acted as to convince us that they will not regard our constitutional rights, then, and then for the first time, arises the doctrine of secession in its practical application.”
In the years preceding slavery’s abolition, nullification was practiced exclusively by abolitionists to the acute dismay of the slave states. To oppose nullification in the context of American history is to side with the slavers.
On top of all of this, Treat actually knows he’s being dishonest. He authored a bill nullifying federal environmental regulations in 2016, and voted in favor of legalizing medical marijuana in violation of federal drug laws in 2018.
For more on nullification, see our “Interposition” page.
On this matter, it’s important to be very specific with our terms. We are not talking about the mother’s “health.” The health exception defined in Doe v. Bolton (1973) is broad enough to include virtually anything. It could be applied to something as trivial as a mother experiencing anxiety. Here, we are addressing situations where the mother’s life is truly in danger.
In a situation where the only way to save the mother’s life is to end the pregnancy, it may be necessary to deliver the child early. As a result of early delivery, and depending on the age of the child at delivery, some children may not survive and that’s a tragedy, but there is no circumstance that necessitates the child be murdered and then delivered. It’s always the responsibility of the doctor to treat both human beings involved like human beings and attempt to save both and it’s always the responsibility of the magistrates to outlaw murder.
Whether the murder of preborn children is legal largely depends on the chief executive of each state. His or her leadership on (or lack thereof) and enforcement of abortion’s abolition (or lack thereof) are the biggest factors involved. The legislature must do its part and pass a bill of abolition. The state attorney general must do his or her part in prosecuting the murderers in accordance with the abolition bill and State Constitution.
Virtually every public office-holder has some part to play, but the largest share of responsibility lies with the governor. He has the bully pulpit. He holds massive influence over what legislation gets passed and sent to his desk. He commands the state’s executive branch, which includes the police. Ultimately, it’s up to him or her to enforce abortion’s abolition. More than anyone else, the buck stops with the governor.
To get these various magistrates to understand their roles in the abolition of abortion and execute them, the people need to instruct them and demand they do it. So get educated in the ideas of abolitionism by reading our ideology pages in the “What We Believe” section of our menu and communicate to your state legislators and executives that the time for compromising with abortion is over and that they are morally and legally obligated to abolish it. We also must expose those who neglect their obligation to obey God and follow the Constitution because of their fear of the Supreme Court. This exposure must be firm while also making clear that should they repent and do the right thing, past differences will be put aside and they will be embraced, having our full support.
From drug laws to environmental regulations to immigration to health care, states, cities, and counties are already ignoring federal laws and rulings. In almost every case of states and subdivisions thereof ignoring the feds, the feds simply back down. It’s almost always a black eye for the feds to crack down on states.
While it’s highly unlikely that the Trump administration would do anything to prevent abortion’s abolition at the state-level, it’s very possible that a Democrat administration would. This would likely take the form of economic sanctions. The good news is that for a state to ignore Roe and abolish abortion, it would have the state government committed to the cause. Additionally, a state would almost certainly be unable to pass or successfully enforce abolition if a large and active portion of the population weren’t fighting for it. With these things in place, a state could very much succeed in facing down the feds to abolish abortion. Almost 80% of the citizenry in Oklahoma profess to be pro-life. Even most Democrats are afraid to support abortion. It would be extremely difficult for the federal government to squash the will of nearly an entire state standing unified for a just cause. As for what exactly that confrontation would look like, it’s impossible to say. Regardless, the results belong to God. It’s our responsibility to simply do what’s right.
An important aspect of this showdown would be the reaction of other states. Once the first domino topples, it’s likely that other states would follow the lead of the state which spearheads the charge against Roe. When Christians around the country see that courage and realize that they aren’t morally or legally bound by the Supreme Court’s arbitrary and evil opinion that mass murder must be allowed by the states, they will demand the same from their state governments. Multiple states joining the movement would make it virtually impossible for the federal government to enforce Roe upon them all.
When Greg Treat and Jason Smalley killed the Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act in 2019, there was an outcry against them. Christians all over the state were outraged. Responding to the outrage, Treat authored a pro-life trigger bill and helped pass three other incremental pro-life bills, raising the total for Oklahoma to 25 pro-life laws on the books. None of these bills brought us any closer to abolishing abortion. In fact, they further entrench the misconception that we are bound by the Supreme Court’s arbitrary opinions and make it more difficult to abolish abortion.
What these bills did accomplish was help Treat save face. The outrage against him was quelled. These bills saved Treat and Jason Smalley’s careers. They were only able to get away with preventing abortion’s abolition by authoring and passing incremental bills that do nothing except communicate to the culture the insidious idea that we’re bound by every arbitrary court opinion up to and including orders to allow mass murder.
Further, these bills teach people dehumanizing misinformation about preborn human beings. Free the States Director Russell Hunter discovered this when he was outside a killing center trying to talk to abortion-minded mothers and fathers. After engaging one young woman who was going in for an abortion, she told Russell that she’s pro-life, but that the abortion was okay because the baby was too young to feel pain. Where did she learn that? From the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. While meeting with Ohio State Senator Andrew Brenner’s office, Free the States’ James Silberman discovered the same thing. After presenting to Brenner’s aide the importance of introducing a bill of abolition, the aide responded, “This is interesting, but it’s Senator Brenner’s personal religious conviction that life begins at a heartbeat. He’s very proud that we just passed the Heartbeat Bill and he has been working to pass that bill since the beginning.” Where did he learn that ridiculous and evil nonsense that life begins at a heartbeat? The Heartbeat Bill.
Incremental pro-life bills are not simply less good than abolition bills. They’re bad. They’re the excuse politicians use to not abolish abortion. They teach the culture dehumanizing misinformation about the preborn and idolatrous information about the Supreme Court. In conservative states, incremental bills and the incremental ideology are quite literally all that’s standing in the way of abolition bills being passed, signed, and enforced.